In today’s demanding business environments a lot of changes need to be made remotely and sometimes even the best laid plans go south. Thankfully Nortel offers the “reload” command in their Ethernet Switch and Ethernet Routing Switch series. I don’t believe the command is available for the 1600 or 8600 series. For those folks that are familiar with Cisco routers this command is identical although the syntax is different. If your making changes that could hang the switch or otherwise leave it improperly configured the reload command will automatically restart the switch after a specified interval has passed. If your configuration changes are successful you can cancel the reload command. If you somehow get disconnected from the switch you only need to wait until the switch reloads the original configuration.

ERS5520-PWR#reload ?
cancel Cancel a previous scheduled reload
force Do not ask for confirmation
minutes-to-wait Minutes to wait before reboot

In one of my previous posts entitled, Network Time Protocol (NTP), I discussed how to setup a network time protocol sever and how to configure the Nortel Ethernet Switch and Ethernet Routing Switches for NTP including Daylight Saving Time (DST) support.

I recently received a message from someone looking for someway to automated the re-configuration of over 100 switches with the correct Daylight Saving Time configuration. I explained to the person that the best long term solution would probably be to use the SNMP MIB but a quick and dirty solution might be to use Expect and call it from a Bash script looping over all the switches that needed to be re-configured. In short Expect is a scripting language that mimics user input at a TTY. The Except script is written to issue a set of commands, as if a human were typing them, and expects various responses.

The script I wrote below only support a limited number of switches. If you have a particular switch you’re welcome to modify the script to support that particular switch. The script will attempt to determine if the switch is running the software that has the features we’re looking to implement. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to test so buyer beware!

I’m sometimes amazed at how many large organizations don’t have a centralized Network Time Protocol (NTP) server setup and devices configured appropriately. When troubleshooting a problem it’s vital that the timestamps in the logs for each switch, router, server and appliance match up correctly.

I’m currently using two CentOS Linux servers to provide time services to over 10,000 devices in the network. My two servers are themselves syncing up with pool.ntp.org over the Internet. With CentOS I didn’t need to build the software, I only needed to install the NTP package through YUM and then configure it appropriately. It was really easy, much easier than it was say 10 years ago when you had to compile the NTP software (University of Delaware) by hand hoping you didn’t run into some missing library of version mismatch with the compiler.

We would first need to install the NTP software using YUM;[root@hostname ]# yum install ntp

We would need to start the NTP daemons;[root@hostname ]# service ntpd start

We would need to configure the server so the NTP software would start after every reboot;[root@hostname ]# chkconfig ntpd on

With that step done we’d have ourselves and internal NTP server which would sync itself to the Internet (default configuration file in /etc/ntp.conf) and then our internal devices would sync to it.

Here are the CLI commands for configuring the ERS 8600 switch properly;

I’ve add the two configuration statements for the new Daylight Saving Time changes that were enacted in 2007. Please also note that I’m in the Eastern timezone (EDT/EST) so if you’re not in the Eastern timezone you would need to supplement your timezone abbreviation appropriately.

Here are the commands for an ES460,ES470,ERS4500 or ERS5500 series switch

The ERS 4500/5500 Series now supports Daylight Saving Time. This feature is NOT supported on the ES460 and ES470 switches. –-CORRECTION: this feature is support on the ES460/470 as of v3.7.x software, please see update at the bottom of this post for additional information. If you wanted to configure the timezone on the ERS4500/ERS5500 switch you would use the following commands;

Hopefully this will provide a brief look into NTP,SNTP and you’ll agree that it really isn’t that hard to setup and configure properly.

Cheers!

Update: June 17, 2008

After posting the article above I decided I would confirm that the Daylight Saving Time feature was not available on the Nortel Ethernet Switch 460/470. I found that as of v3.7.x software the feature is supported on the switches. The configuration commands are identical to the ERS4500/ERS5500 switches. Here’s an example specifically for the Eastern timezone.

There have been quite a few comments posted to the Factory Reset Nortel Ethernet Switch article. One of those comments requested some help in how to set the passwords from the CLI (command line interface). You’ll obviously need the read-write password in order to login to the switch and reset the passwords. Without the read-write password you’ll need to factory reset the switch.

Note: I’m still trying to figure out the best way to display the CLI stuff… if I use the PRE HTML tag the font is really too small, if I don’t use the PRE HTML tag the formatting (spacing) gets lost making it difficult to compare the post with the real world output from a CLI interface.

Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5500 Series (v5.1)

Here’s how to set the passwords on the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5500 Series (v5.1 software).

5520-48T-PWR>enable
5520-48T-PWR#config term
Enter configuration commands, one per line. End with CNTL/Z.

If you’ve ever tried to connect to the web interface of a Nortel Ethernet Switch 460/470 or Ethernet Routing Switch 5510/5520/5530 you might have found that you need to provide a username.

In software release v3.7.x for the Nortel Ethernet Switch 460/470 you’ll also find that you now need to provide a username when you telnet into the switch (in previous releases you were only prompted for a password, now you are prompted for a username and password).

For the above mentioned switches there are only two levels of access, read-write and read-only.

The default username for the read-write user level is RW. The default username for the read-only user level is RO.

Updated 1/16/08: I should have included the default passwords for those two accounts. The default password for the read-write user level is “secure”. The default password for the read-only user level is “user”.